


Never Hurts to Ask

by boxparade



Series: Transformative [4]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Coming Out, M/M, Pre-Slash, Questions, Trans Character, so many questions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 06:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4210911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is still hunched over paperwork in his office, and Danny takes a couple breaths and figures: no time but the present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Hurts to Ask

**Author's Note:**

> hey all!
> 
> figured it was time for an update on this one. :) forewarning, it's longer, which means it'll probably be a bit longer before I post the next in the series, as well. but it also means there's more to read. yay!
> 
> also, I'm hoping you'll all love this one because it's been long-awaited, but I know it's a pretty intricate topic, and I'm trying to balance realism and humor, so if you have any questions about why I do the things I do, it never hurts to ask. (SEE WHAT I DID THERE? I'm so clever...)
> 
> as always, be civil and I won't have to pull out bitchy-writer-mode.
> 
> hope you like it! (I know I do, but I'm biased, so.)
> 
> ~

Danny wakes up in the hospital, and miracle or miracles, this time it’s not Steve’s fault. Steve isn’t even here. Rachel is instead.

“Hello, Daniel.”

Danny thinks he might actually have preferred if it were Steve’s fault again.

“Why?” is about all he gets out. He means both “Why am I here?” and “Why are you here?” but he only gets the first part answered.

“I’ve been told there was a gas leak in that box you call a flat. I called your landlord and did you know there was black mold in the walls? It’s a shame the gas leak didn’t cause a fire. If you think for one moment I’m allowing Grace to stay there after—”

“Slow down,” Danny grumbles, rubbing at his eyes. They feel like they’ve been glued shut. He doesn’t have any IVs and he’s still wearing his clothes, albeit his pajamas. Not very serious, then. Beyond the obvious of the gas leaking into his apartment building and keeping him out cold for the ride here. Grace is absolutely never setting foot in that apartment again. Danny’s going to have to find a new place.

“Daniel,” Rachel says stoutly, her arms crossed and tapping her foot on the tile floor. The _click click click_ is a beat off the beeping from some machine to his right. It’s incredibly annoying. Danny hates hospitals.

“Why are you here?” Danny asks, jostling around until he can sit up properly. His muscles feel achy, like he slept funny, and he rolls his shoulders a couple times.

“Because apparently,” Rachel says slowly, with just a touch of poison lining her words, “My name still appears on your legal documents under ‘healthcare power of attorney’.”

Danny frowns and tries to remember if he ever changed that.

“ _Daniel_.”

“Rachel,” Danny mimics, crossing his arms and tapping his foot—which looks a little ridiculous, given he’s on a hospital bed and it’s just a bump moving around under the blankets.

“Don’t sass me, Daniel, I’m not in the mood.”

“Well I’m not in the mood to be speaking to you but here you are.”

Rachel sighs. “You are absolutely insufferable. You need to change your legal documents. I’ve had the hospital send for them. I expect you’ll be prompt about this.”

Danny narrows his eyes. As a general rule, he avoids changing anything legal because it brings unwanted questions and winds up aggravating him and everyone in contact with him. There’s usually a lot of yelling involved. It gives Danny a headache, and then he can’t think straight anyway so any decisions he makes aren’t of sound mind. “Why, exactly, do I need to do this?”

“As you’ve _just_ said, so that you won’t have to speak to me the next time your questionable living arrangements poison you whilst you sleep.” Rachel puts emphasis on almost every other word, drawing out her vowels in that infuriating, British way that means she thinks everything she’s saying is entirely unnecessary and that Danny is incredibly slow.

Danny rubs absently at his jaw. “Why do you keep marrying Americans?”

“For God’s sake, change the bloody forms!” Rachel snaps, and then she marches out of the hospital room. Danny covers his eyes, blocking out the fluorescent lighting, and stays like that until the doctor comes to release him and hand him the power of attorney forms.

 

###

 

Steve is the logical choice. Steve is clinically insane, yes, but Danny likes to think he’s got enough sanity stored away for a rainy day that he could potentially drag out for when Danny’s in the hospital and unable to speak for himself. Steve will probably be the one to put Danny in the hospital, but at least then he’ll be able to give the doctors all the information they need.

Danny is content in the fact that at least he has someone picked out. That doesn’t mean he’s going to approach Steve about it just yet. The only reason he needs to do this right now is because Rachel is going to be angry, but Rachel is perpetually angry, so that’s not much of an incentive.

And then, because the universe hates him, as has been well-established by this point in his life, they work a case with a six year old kid who winds up in the hospital with a recently-widowed step-parent fighting the hospital to make any decisions. Normally, they’re long gone by that point. They got the kid back, the doctors say he’s gonna be fine, they pat themselves on the back and go back to HQ to fill out paperwork and they don’t miss the complications that arise later.

This time, because Steve is a giant softie, they return to give the kid some balloons and see how he’s doing only to wind up in the middle of a bureaucratic nightmare. There’s nothing they can do, which Danny has to tell Steve multiple times, but Steve insists on sticking around anyway and possibly waking up the Governor with a fruitless attempt at getting this woman some sort of help. It works out, and the kid is going to be fine, but by the time Steve is assured everything is right with this particular corner of the world and he doesn’t need to give anyone a SEAL death glare, it’s near eleven at night.

They’re trudging out to Danny’s car and Steve says “I’ll drop you at yours,” as he gets into the driver’s seat.

Danny sighs and shoves himself into the passenger side. “No, yours. My apartment. Gas leak. Remember?”

Steve grunts in a way that signifies ‘Caveman understand human speak’ and pulls onto the highway. Danny rolls his eyes and wishes he weren’t still amped up on enough adrenaline and shitty hospital coffee to run a marathon. (Not that Danny would ever run a marathon. He doesn’t hate himself.)

Steve pulls into his own drive and lets the car idle, his hands still on the wheel and the engine still on. Danny raises his eyebrows. “Okay, you do remember that you live here too, right?”

Steve frowns a little and says “I was gonna head back to HQ. Get a start on some of the paperwork for this case.”

Danny chokes on air. “I’m sorry, did I just hear the word ‘paperwork’ come out of your mouth?”

Steve huffs. “I do paperwork, Danny. I do lots of paperwork.”

Danny scoffs.

“I do the paperwork I have to do for the Governor to keep me employed,” Steve amends, which is a little better but doesn’t quite address the fact that Steve’s idea of paperwork involves sentences like ‘He resisted, so I put a grenade in his mouth.’

“Okay, alright,” Danny says, with a long-suffering tone and a rub of his eyes. “Take me with you so I can fix all the forms you inevitably mess up _before_ you submit them to the department.”

“I’m not gonna make you stay u—”

“I’m awake anyway, Steve. Too much coffee. Come on. Let’s go.” Danny waves his finger around in a loop. Turn the car around.

Steve doesn’t fight it much, which shows how preoccupied with the lasting effects of this case he is. They drive in silence back to HQ, and they keep all but a couple of desk lamps and the computer table on while they settle in for the long haul of late-night paperwork.

It’s mostly quiet, an easy silence broken only by the occasional “What time did we reach the docks again?”

Danny finishes the latest stack of forms, still warm from the printer, and blows out a breath, leaning back in his chair. Steve is still hunched over paperwork in his office, and Danny takes a couple breaths and figures, no time but the present.

He walks up to Steve’s desk, shoves his hands in his pockets, and says “Hey.”

Steve looks up and puts his pen down. Danny doesn’t miss the slight smile that graces Steve’s lips when he sees Danny. “What’s up?”

Danny rocks back and forth on his heels. “I know you’re going to freak out when I tell you this, but I’m asking you not to in the vain hope you won’t. But that gas leak in my apartment?”

Steve looks concerned, and nods.

“It knocked me out and I wound up in the hospital. Which is—”

“Danny!”

“Which is _fine_ , because I’m _fine_ , I just need to find a new apartment which, that will happen but point being, I realized the person with my healthcare power of attorney is still Rachel.”

“Oh,” Steve says, and falls back into his chair.

Danny hums with a sarcastic little smile. “So before Rachel takes my head off, and before I wind up hospitalized again, I need to change that.”

Danny reaches around to his back pocket, where he’s got the forms the hospital gave him rolled up, and plops them down on the desk in front of Steve. Danny’s already filled in Steve’s name and information in all the necessary parts, all Steve has to do is sign it.

Steve takes a moment to look at what it is Danny’s just put in front of him, and then looks up at Danny. “Me?”

Danny huffs out a laugh. “Like I haven’t been your emergency contact for months.” Steve glances down.

Danny watches Steve’s brain work through everything with his array of facial expressions, and then he picks up his pen and signs on the dotted lines.

“Thank you,” Danny says, “Just don’t take this as permission to get me hospitalized again.”

Steve shoots Danny a sharp grin. “You bet.”

Danny rolls his eyes and collects his forms so he can send them in for processing and get Rachel off his back.

Steve goes to stand up then, maybe suggest they head back to Steve’s for some sleep—it’s nearing two in the morning, now. But Danny stops him, says “Wait,” and watches as Steve sits back down.

Honestly, Danny had been waiting for a better moment to do this, but he’s starting to realize that with Steve, this is about the best time he’s going to find. They’re not actively being shot at, and that was the only requirement Danny had left that he hadn’t already tossed out the window.

“So I am generally a private person.” Danny waits, then rolls his hand around like ‘hurry up’ and says “We’re nodding, agreement, acknowledgment, come on.”

Steve nods dutifully.

“I don’t like people knowing things they have no business knowing. That is becoming less and less true for you.”

Steve grins.

“Don’t give me that dopey look, you know who you are to me. Now, I want you to consider very carefully that what I am about to tell you is not easy for me, okay?”

Steve nods, and looks concerned, and maybe a little constipated, but that seems pretty typical for Steve so Danny lets it slide.

Danny takes a moment just to breathe, and leans back against the arm of the couch behind him, taking some of the weight off his legs. “I was born as Danielle Susan Williams. As a female.” _As a male in a biologically-female body,_ he thinks, but doesn’t say, because some things are complicated enough without bringing in politically-correct terminology. Danny’s just hoping Steve’s got the male pronouns down. The rest can come later.

Steve cocks his head to the side and narrows his eyes at Danny. “Did Kono put you up to this? Her prank game is really falling in calibre.”

Danny sighs and crosses his arms. “No, Steve, Kono didn’t put me up to this. I’m not joking.”

Steve rolls his eyes.

Danny sets his jaw and waits.

“Seriously, Danny, it’s too late for jokes.”

“Good thing I’m not telling any, then.” Danny reminds himself that Steve isn’t being purposefully mean, he’s just an idiot. A lovable idiot that Danny doesn’t actually want to strangle.

Well, that’s a lie. But regardless.

“Danny. You’re obviously not a woman. Can we get back to the case files, or did you wanna head home?”

Danny warms a little that Steve thinks he’s so obviously male there’s no possibility for doubt in his mind. But this is making his job harder. He rubs a hand over his face and pushes his hair back. “We’re not heading home until you realize that I’m serious. And then you’re going to stumble through a very awkward apology and I’m telling you right now: Please don’t. Just don’t apologize, it’ll make us both feel awful and it’s too late for that.”

Steve, who’s been waiting for a punchline this whole time, seems to be at the tipping point. Danny keeps on waiting, eyes fixed carefully on Steve’s expression.

“Sinking in yet?” Danny asks.

“Danny, be serious.”

“Okay,” Danny says, and then doesn’t say anything else. Steve waits. And waits a little more. “You believe me yet?”

“No.”

“Take as much time as you need, babe. We’ve got all night.” Danny doesn’t exactly mean that. It’s late, and he’s tired. But he’s confident Steve will get there soon.

“You’re serious?”

Ding. Order up.

“Yes. Believe it or not, I don’t joke about these things.”

“Huh,” Steve says quietly, then leans forward on his desk and keeps his head fixed downward. Danny can hear him breathing in and out, in carefully counted breaths. Danny waits at least twenty cycles before saying anything.

“You okay there, buddy?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, sounding a little breathless. “Yeah, I’m—”

Danny shifts his position against the arm of the couch, and crosses his arms the opposite way. “I need you to know. If you ever need to make medical decisions for me, then you need to know.”

“Right,” Steve says, still sounding like there’s not enough air in the room.

“Are we gonna be alright?” Danny asks, because Steve isn’t looking too sold on this idea. Which Danny expected, of course, but he’s still not entirely sure how he’s handling it. But Steve hasn’t shot him yet, so. Silver lining.

“Yeah,” Steve squeaks out, “Yeah, we. Yeah.”

Danny watches Steve’s back move with his breaths.

“Okay,” he says, “Are you sure? Because I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you, this? This looks like a freak out.”

“I’m not—I’m not. I. I am not.”

“Yeah,” Danny says slowly, “I’ll believe that when you start talking in whole sentences again.”

Danny watches as Steve processes this a little more, then lifts his head up to look at Danny. He manages about two full seconds of eye contact before he sweeps down Danny’s body, like there are going to be glaring signs or clues he missed.

Danny smiles and waves a little satirically. “Hi there. Still Danny. Still here.”

“You—You’re—” Steve starts, his mouth opening and closing with half-formed thoughts.

“Transgender,” Danny fills in for him, helpfully, because Steve is having some trouble in the words department right now.

Steve squeaks like an injured shipped-in-from-the-mainland, purebred rabbit and looks up at Danny with wide eyes.

“It’s not a swear word, babe.” It’s a little ironic, given the way Danny used to think pretty much the same thing when he first started transitioning until Rachel was on him night and day about self-acceptance.

Steve keeps looking at Danny and looking at his desk, then back again, then again, and again. “You—You. You?” He goes through about five more variations of “you” before he snaps his mouth shut.

“Me,” Danny says, with a little ta-da hand wave.

Steve breathes heavily and stares at Danny with a confused little frown. Danny waits it out for about two minutes, by which point he’s fairly sure he broke Steve, so he sighs and says “Alright, babe. I’m gonna drive us back to your place, and you’re going to get some sleep, and then we’ll talk about this in the morning, okay?”

Steve says “Okay” in a pitch so high Danny wonders if the Navy trained Steve to speak dolphin.

Danny walks around Steve’s desk and pulls him up by the arm, and counts it as a plus that Steve doesn’t flinch away. He shoves Steve into the passenger side of the Camaro, which is the first sign that Steve is almost entirely incapacitated, since he doesn’t fight to drive. Danny turns on the radio, keeping it low, and herds Steve out the car, up the stairs, and into bed. Much like Danny has done for Grace. Figures, McGarrett would turn into a child past his bedtime. Danny honestly doesn’t know what he was expecting.

Danny brushes his teeth in Steve’s bathroom, with the extra toothbrush Danny’s entirely sure is only for him, and takes the couch to wait for morning to come.

 

###

 

Danny wakes up, stumbles to the kitchen for coffee, and is watching the waves roll in through the window when Steve comes in from his morning swim, dripping seawater all over the floor.

“Oh, hey,” Steve says, “There’s malasadas in the fridge.”

Danny makes a mad dash and grabs the bag before Steve’s even finished speaking. “Yoo ahh a Gob.”

“Remember that the next time I use advanced interrogation techniques,” Steve says, and Danny swallows and huffs in disbelief. Yeah, right.

Steve gets himself a glass of orange juice and for a brief moment, both of them forget that anything is weird between them. But the silence turns awkward, and Steve makes a break for the beach saying he forgot something out there, as if he’d left with anything other than his swim trunks. And the amount that they’re not speaking begins to outrun the amount they are, which is frankly disconcerting, considering this is them.

Sometime around noon, after Steve’s gone on what must be sixteen runs, Danny starts picking up on the little fidgety behavior that means Steve has something he wants to say, but won’t let himself. That, and the fact that he’ll walk up to Danny, open his mouth like he’s about to talk, then suddenly snap it shut and walk away.

Because that’s not a dead giveaway, or anything.

“What?” Danny snaps, sometime around one, after the third time Steve has pulled something out of a cabinet, put it on the counter, and then put it back in the cabinet in the exact same place. “Please, have mercy and just _say_ whatever it is that’s got you looking like there are fire ants in your swim trunks.”

Steve startles and places the pancake mix back into a different place in the cabinet, this time. “What? I’m not—I don’t have anything to say.”

Danny laughs. “That’s hilarious.”

“Danny, I don’t know what you’re talking abo—”

“Babe. Steve,” Danny says quickly, with placating hand gestures, all ‘tame the spooked animal into submission’, “I’m a detective. Okay?”

Steve doesn’t seem to have any defense for that, and he settles back against the counter only to spring up again, like he’s got restless leg syndrome except during his waking life. (Actually, that might be worth looking into.)

“Just. I promise not to get angry, alright? Besides, Rachel always said talking about this was healthy, or what have you, so. Have at it. Say whatever you wanna say.”

Apparently, that was all the prompting Steve needed. “Did you used to have boobs?”

Danny, honest-to-God, is one second away from breaking the promise he _just made_ before he stops himself. Still, he can’t help the huff of annoyance that escapes his lungs.

Steve is apologizing and withdrawing immediately, his hands up, backing away like Danny is some sort of rabid animal that’s ready to bite him at any time. (This is a healthy fear that Danny tries to nurture and cultivate, because it means Steve has a slight tendency toward listening to Danny, on occasion.)

But Danny is a grown-up, and besides, his daughter has asked him all of these questions at some point in her life, though those encounters are better left forgotten.

“Really? That’s the anatomy you choose to focus on right off the bat?” Steve looks terrified at the suggestion that there are other parts of anatomy to focus on, and Danny decides to give him time before trying to breach that subject. “Yes, Steve,” Danny says, drawn-out and a little defeated, “I had breasts until the doctors chopped them off.”

Steve squeaks and then honest-to-God runs away. Right out of the room. Without a word.

“Steve!” Danny yells after him, “When you come back I’m re-enrolling you in the fifth grade! You’ve obviously missed some important lessons.” By the time he finishes, Steve’s already long out of earshot, and Danny’s mostly talking to himself.

He takes a sip of his coffee, which is starting to go cold, and laughs himself into stitches before pouring another cup. Steve McGarrett, badass Navy SEAL boy, shoots first and throws grenades later, defeated by a mastectomy.

 

###

 

Apparently, once he got one question out of the way, it opened some sort of valve, and all of Steve’s emotional repression broke open long enough to let out gems like:

“How do you pee?”

Danny takes a moment to process this little revelation and stares in mild disbelief at Steve. Steve is currently trying very, very hard to keep it together and not blush and run away (again). His jaw is set and he’s maintaining steady eye contact with Danny from where he’s standing.

Danny does not want to get into the very complicated and embarrassing topic of apparatus right now, so he goes for the easy answer, which is “Well, Steve, I imagine it’s much like how you take a shit.”

Steve’s eyes widen and he gets out “Through your assho—” before Danny cuts him off.

“Sitting down! _Sitting down!_ Oh my God, what is _wrong_ with you?”

Steve frowns but looks properly shameful, so Danny just shakes his head and rests his forehead on the palm of his hand, trying to press hard enough to relieve some of this headache he can feel forming.

“Any other ridiculous questions?”

“Nope,” Steve says quickly, and then scampers back to his own office, occasionally stealing glances up and through two panes of glass to where Danny is having an aneurism and not getting any work done. By the time Chin comes knocking at his door with a new case, Danny has given up and popped a couple of ibuprofen. Steve, the bastard, looks like he has a firm grasp on reality, despite the fact that he’s clinically insane and needs to be institutionalized. And sent back to elementary school.

Jesus.

 

###

 

“How do you grow a beard?” Steve asks, while they’re out getting drinks after another exhausting case, Kono long since possessed by the music and out on the dance floor, Chin flirting with the bartender who’s been giving him eyes all night, and has a smile just like Malia’s.

“The same way you do. Testosterone.”

“Huh,” Steve says, taking a sip of his Longboard and thinking as he casts his eyes toward the ceiling. “I guess that makes sense.”

Danny’s witty reply is cut off by Chin’s return with a lot more liquor than he probably had to pay for, and Kono’s magical reappearance at the first sign of more booze.

“Bottoms up,” Kono says, as Danny clinks his shot glass together with theirs and prays for the alcohol to block out the ridiculousness.

 

###

 

They’re on a ridiculous case that has them stomping out into the jungle after some locals that decided to use their large chunk of uninhabited land to open up a cocaine operation, and Danny pulls a butterfly knife out of his pocket to cut down a rope contraption the drug ring hung in a tree.

Steve gives him a strange look, and then asks “Were you in Girl Scouts?”

Danny slices through the rope and the contraption thunks to the ground. He gives Steve a flat look. “No.”

Steve frowns, glancing at the butterfly knife, which is being folded back up and put into Danny’s pocket. “Boy Scouts?”

“No,” Danny answers again.

“...Cub Scouts?” Steve asks, wracking his brain.

“Did you know, Steven, that ‘being prepared’ is a skill also taught _in life?”_

With the look Steve gives him, Danny’s fairly sure Steve _didn’t_ know that. But at the very least, he doesn’t say anything else, and they spend the next two hours tracking down the drug operation with excessive amounts of mud and bullets.

 

###

 

“So how long have you been...” Steve waves his open hand up and down, then side to side, and Danny stares at him and tries to catalogue that hand movement with any of the McGarrett Sign Language signs that he knows.

“Blessed by the Pope?” Danny tries.

Steve huffs, shooting Danny a heavy-lidded, annoyed look. “Male.”

Danny’s eyebrows shoot up, and he says, without hesitation, “Since birth.”

Steve knits his eyebrows together and scratches at the side of his face. “But I thought you said—”

Danny rests his chin on his palm and gives Steve a smug, tight smile. He waits for Steve to catch on.

_One, two, three, four..._

“Oh—”

There it is.

“I meant, um, not that—But when, um, with the—” Steve gestures again, helpless.

“The word you are searching for is ‘transitioning’, and the answer you are searching for is 21. I was 21.”

Steve’s ears flush pink. “Oh. Okay.”

Danny sighs. If he’s honest, he’s getting used to these oddball questions brought up out of the blue. At least Steve is trying. “One day, you are going to thank me profusely for my endless patience.”

“Doubtful,” Steve shoots back, loosening up a bit, “Maybe if you weren’t such a sarcastic little shit...”

“Wanna call me that again after the vagina talk?”

Steve _whimpers_. Danny’s grin this time is entirely genuine, and extremely satisfying.

 

###

 

“Do you buy Vitamins for Men?” Steve asks.

Danny glances up from the game. “No, I buy the ones for people.”

Steve seems vaguely disappointed, and a little sad.

Danny is 100% certain that this winter he is going to find his stocking stuffed with Vitamins for Men, Men’s Health Magazine, Just For Men hair dye, and Dr Pepper.

 

###

 

“Boxers or briefs?”

Danny has to take a minute just to comprehend the fact that Steve has asked him this question, like they’re doing ice breakers at a men’s club.

“Neither,” Danny says, and at Steve’s strange (hopeful? scared? confused? gassy?) look, continues “Boxer briefs.”

Steve hums. “You know, I hear going commando is better for yo—”

“No.”

 

###

 

“Have you ever done it with a guy?”

Danny very, very carefully puts his beer down on the coaster on Steve’s coffee table. He’s a fantastic roommate. “I don’t think that’s a conversation you’re ready for.”

“Danny,” Steve whines, a bit like a child, “I’ve told you about all my sexcapades.”

Danny pauses, holding air in his cheeks before puffing it out in sheer disbelief. “The fact that you called it ‘sexcapades’ tells me you’re definitely not ready for this conversation.”

Steve frowns. “Danny, I’m 35 years old.”

“Exactly,” Danny says, pointing at Steve, and doesn’t say another word on the subject.

 

###

 

Just when Danny thinks Steve might finally, finally be done asking him questions, Steve manages to reach a whole new dimension of idiocy.

“Does Rachel know?”

Considering that they are currently in Rachel’s tea room (which is really her sitting room or something-or-other, but the only thing she ever uses it for is torturing people like Danny with tea and forced civil conversation) and Rachel is currently boiling water and not in the room to hear this, Danny assumes (rightly so) that this question is one that can be answered quickly, before Rachel returns. He also assumes that it is a somewhat reasonable (for Steve) question.

“Know what?” Danny asks, leaning back and kicking his feet up on Rachel’s coffee table, because he knows it makes her angry.

Steve looks a little panicked, and flicks his eyes toward the doorway. He leans forward and whispers, like he’s honestly concerned about Rachel hearing this, “You know.” Steve makes his ‘Father-Son-Holy-Spirit You’re-A-Transsexual’ hand gesture.

Danny stares at Steve. And keeps staring at Steve. He narrows his eyes, and then keeps staring, and then leans forward, and then leans back again. And then Danny opens his mouth to speak and nothing comes out, so he shuts it.

This is. This is a bucket of fun just _waiting_ to be dumped all over someone’s head.

Danny can’t stand it anymore. “Does my ex-wife know I’m tr—” he has to stop, because he starts laughing in the middle of his sentence and he can’t breathe. He honestly cannot breathe, and he cannot stop laughing. He curls over himself, clutching his stomach, which is already starting to hurt, and he has tears coming out of his eyes because this is a god damn _gem_ , this one is going to be a story Danny tells _for the rest of his life._ This is. Wow.

“Danny,” Steve says, like a whine, and like it’s still a serious question, which, what.

“Steve. Babe. Are you seriously—I’m sorry, what is wrong with you? You need help. Medical help. I can’t fix this. You—Does my ex-wife know I’m trans? Does—” Danny starts laughing again, but has to stop himself, because if he laughs this moment away he won’t be able to fully appreciate it. “Does my ex-wife, who I was _married to_ , and _had a child with_ , know? Is that your question? Is that—oh dear God,” Danny says on an exhale, breathless from the laughing. Rachel chooses that moment to walk in with tea, and Danny is still mostly breathless and beside himself, and Steve is still flushed and nervous and possibly realizing exactly how ridiculous his question is.

“What’s all this then?” Rachel asks, setting the tea down right next to Danny’s feet, which she then shoves unceremoniously off her coffee table. Danny doesn’t even care right now, this is too rich.

“Steve has a question for you, Rachel,” Danny says, choking on air.

“Concerning the medical documents? I haven’t looked at them since the divorce, I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask. Regardless, Daniel would know better than I would, considering it’s his paperwork.” Rachel shoots him a sidelong glare, and Danny’s still too busy laughing to actually give it any thought.

Steve tries to back down, probably having seen exactly how ridiculous he is, but Danny is not letting him out of this one so easily.

“Steve asked if you _know_.” Danny hiccups.

“Know what?” Rachel asks, turning her head and raising her eyebrows, glancing between Steve and Danny.

“That I’m trans,” Danny says, in a mock-whisper, feeling almost like he did when he and Rachel were first dating and trying to freak people out, talking about this kind of thing in quiet voices everyone could still hear.

Rachel looks between them, waiting for the punch line, and then turns to Danny and says “Oh dear God, and you’re giving him power over your life? Are you mad?”

“Steve must be rubbing off on me.”

“It was a valid question,” Steve says, frowning and crossing his arms, still red but trying valiantly to defend himself. It’s a lost cause, especially given Rachel’s presence, but it keeps Danny from being the single most awful human being on the planet in Rachel’s eyes.

“Right, and what would my valid answer have been? ‘No, she married a guy without a dick and thought it was normal’.”

“Don’t be crass,” Rachel snaps, and sits primly on the opposite end of the couch from Steve. Danny rolls his eyes at the both of them and grabs for the tea Rachel insisted on making. Danny can basically see Steve’s brain cartwheeling about the “without a dick” comment. At some point Danny needs to have the infamous Some Men Have Vaginas Talk with Steve. Before he finds another opportunity to make a fool of himself. Not that Danny doesn’t enjoy this immensely.

“If you’re quite finished, I’m having guests over this afternoon and I’d rather wrap up before then.” She pulls a manila folder out of a plastic filing bin and sets it on her lap. “Now, this folder is most everything pre-testosterone. I presume you understand what that means?”

Steve nods and accepts the stack from Rachel, dumping it in his own lap and then looking up and across the coffee table at Danny with wide, concerned eyes. Probably wondering _why_ on God’s green earth Rachel has all this paperwork about him. Honestly, Danny had forgotten how much she kept track of. Copies of everything. Danny got a flu shot, she wanted medical documents. She should’ve gone into medicine. Or medical law, so she could retain the bloodsucking part.

Danny just grins sarcastically at Steve and twirls his finger next to his head, mouthing ‘crazy’.

“I can see you, Daniel. Need I remind you that I still have photo albums from our dating years?”

Danny’s laugh cuts off in the middle. “Do _not_ —” he starts, deadly serious, because photo albums are protected territory, Rachel should have some respect—

“Now this folder documents everything post-T until Grace, including...”

 

###

 

Danny is, as usual, ranting about Rachel, and how she deserves every one of the swath of ringtones Danny has given her, including the brief couple of weeks where Grace was going through another Disney phase and somehow “Cruella De Vil” wound up on his phone.

“Is it my fault that I married Satan herself? Maybe. But that doesn’t give her the right to use that as an _excuse_ , okay? I was led to believe she was human like the rest of us, she’s the one who hid the fire and brimstone under make-up and a sexy British accent and didn’t let it out until _after_ we were married with a kid, which is just—”

“How did you marry her?” Steve interrupts, already giving Danny his ‘no I’m not interrupting because you kept going on, why would you think that?’ face.

“That’s what I’m saying!” Danny says, throwing his arm in Steve’s direction, a punctuation to his point.

“No, I meant _how_. I thought gay marriage was illegal back then.”

Danny has to pause mid-rant, which is not only annoying but incredibly confusing, mostly because he can’t exactly parse out where Steve is going with this.

“That’s fascinating and also irrelevant, Steve, since Rachel and I did not get gay-married, because Rachel and I were not a gay couple.”

Steve’s got aneurism number god-knows on right now. “I meant with your—” Steve waves his hand.

“The Catholic Church called, they want their hand signal back,” Danny snipes, and before Steve can get defensive and look dumb, Danny waves a hand around—not in a motion that means ‘forgive me father for I have sinned’—and says “We didn’t get married until after I got my ID changed. We had to wait for a couple of laws on that one, but after that they didn’t much care that I wanted to marry Satan Incarnate.”

“You had to change your ID?”

Danny pauses mid-rant again, accepting that he’s just going to have to give in to this line of questioning because Steve clearly doesn’t care about the part where Danny married the Devil, and cares more about the part where he went to the DMV. “Yes, Steve, that’s generally what you do when you’re not the gender the government seems to think you are.”

“Right. Yeah. I—I’m sorry. I never thought about it.” Steve seems honestly a little turned around by this, which is confusing. Since this is not the thing Danny would think to turn Steve around. There are about a hundred other little elements of his life that he would think, yeah, maybe a fair reason for someone to seem upset about, on his behalf, but this was not one of them. Going to the DMV did not make his list of ‘things I could tell Steve that would potentially upset him’.

If he’s honest, he didn’t really have a list at all, because Steve is not the type to have emotions at all. But here they were.

“Listen, babe, I know the lines at the DMV are awful but it really wasn’t that bad for me.”

“No, I—” Steve pauses, and there’s a crease between his eyebrows that Danny’s pretty sure is bouncing right back into Steve’s skull and giving him a headache. Or an aneurism. With Steve’s pain denialism, it could be either at any given moment. “I never—with any of this. But I met you. So now I do. There is... A lot. There’s a lot, Danny. So I’m sorry.”

Danny squints at Steve long enough for Steve to actually glance up at him, through eyelashes that seem a little darker than before. “So... I don’t know if that made sense in your world, but out here on Earth it did not. Rather than ask you to clarify, which I’m sure will be painful and probably take too long, I’m going to go with: Congratulations on your expanded worldview, and thanks but no thanks for the pity. Was I close?”

It takes Steve a moment, but he grins and huffs out a laugh. “Yeah. Pretty close,” Steve says, rubbing at the back of his neck and grinning at Danny so brightly his eyes crinkle at the corners.

That’s enough blood wrung from a stone for today, so Danny gives Steve a pass and says “So Satan, ruler of the underworld, queen of darkness, eternal, unholy evil woman who controls my custody agreement...”

 

###

 

“Hey, Danny...?” Steve calls from the other room, in that tone that means he’s got a question and he expects Danny to drop everything and answer him right away.

Luckily, this time, ‘everything’ is just a couple of longboards and a relaxing night out on the lanai, winding down after a case. “What?” He calls back, popping the tops off both the Longboards and taking a long pull of his before walking out onto the lanai, where Steve is standing, facing out over the ocean. If they’re going to have another Conversation, Danny would prefer to have at least a little alcohol in his system before he has to attempt to explain the intricacies of his life to Steve-the-naive-seal-pup.

Danny rolls his shoulders and takes a deep breath, gears himself up not to get angry, and steps up next to Steve, handing him a beer.

Steve turns to accept the beer, phone in his other hand, and says, with a hint of a smile, “How do you feel about take-out?”


End file.
